Cooks, warriors, and authors must be judged by the effects they produce:  toothsome dishes, glorious victories, pleasant books—­these are our demands.  We have nothing to do with ingredients, tactics, or methods.  We have no desire to be admitted into the kitchen, the council, or the study.  The cook may clean her saucepans how she pleases—­the warrior place his men as he likes—­the author handle his material or weave his plot as best he can—­when the dish is served we only ask, Is it good? when the battle has been fought, Who won? when the book comes out, Does it read?

Authors ought not to be above being reminded that it is their first duty to write agreeably; some very disagreeable ones have succeeded in doing so, and there is therefore no need for any one to despair.  Every author, be he grave or gay, should try to make his book as ingratiating as possible.  Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.  Nobody is under any obligation to read any other man’s book.

Literature exists to please,—­to lighten the burden of men’s lives; to make them for a short while forget their sorrows and their sins, their silenced hearths, their disappointed hopes, their grim futures—­and those men of letters are the best loved who have best performed literature’s truest office.  Their name is happily legion, and I will conclude these disjointed remarks by quoting from one of them, as honest a parson as ever took tithe or voted for the Tory candidate, the Rev. George Crabbe.  Hear him in ’The Frank Courtship’:—­

     “I must be loved,” said Sybil; “I must see
     The man in terrors, who aspires to me: 
     At my forbidding frown his heart must ache,
     His tongue must falter, and his frame must shake;
     And if I grant him at my feet to kneel,
     What trembling fearful pleasure must he feel! 
     Nay, such the rapture that my smiles inspire
     That reason’s self must for a time retire.” 
     “Alas! for good Josiah,” said the dame,
     “These wicked thoughts would fill his soul with shame;
     He kneel and tremble at a thing of dust! 
     He cannot, child:”—­the child replied, “He must.”

Were an office to be opened for the insurance of literary reputations, no critic at all likely to be in the society’s service would refuse the life of a poet who could write like Crabbe.  Cardinal Newman, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr. Swinburne, are not always of the same way of thinking, but all three hold the one true faith about Crabbe.

But even were Crabbe now left unread, which is very far from being the case, his would be an enviable fame—­for was he not one of the favored poets of Walter Scott, and whenever the closing scene of the great magician’s life is read in the pages of Lockhart, must not Crabbe’s name be brought upon the reader’s quivering lip?

To soothe the sorrow of the soothers of sorrow, to bring tears to the eyes and smiles to the cheeks of the lords of human smiles and tears, is no mean ministry, and it is Crabbe’s.